Hi, I'm a person living in the North East of England who has schizophrenia. I have been in and out of hospital between 2001-2004. This blog will be notes about my experiences as a patient (aka client) both in hospital and in the community. I can be contacted via email to ian DOT bruntlett AT gmail.com (delete the "DOT", "AT" and spaces from that email address). What is schizopanic? Its the panic that flashes through someone's eyes when you tell them you've got schizophrenia.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Schizophrenia has
positive symptoms (strange name – they include delusions, confused
speech and thoughts, all sorts of hallucinations) and negative
symptoms (lack of emotion, lethargy). For more details see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia

Well, schizophrenics
eventually stumble across coping strategies – things that can help
make life with schizophrenia a bit more bearable. One of my
strategies is sleep. However, that tends to eat into the day so just
over a week ago I started getting out of bed early. Discovered that
you can’t change sleeping habits just by deciding to do so – I
decided to bribe myself to get out of bed by promising a cup of tea,
porridge and a DVD – but it is an ongoing fight. Discovered that
you need to choose your battles wisely – by all means, get up early
on some weekdays – but for days where an early rise isn’t quite
so important, have a modest lie-in.

Another coping
strategies for me is music. I find it helps suppress me from hearing
voices and from having “mind’s eye” visions. I have been having
a disturbing vision where parts of my body turn completely black, a
light blue hexagonal pattern covers those parts and then they
disintegrate into nothingness. Is there any wonder why I sleep a lot
and listen to music? People with vision are sought after in
organisations however, if you tell them you have visions, they are
not so keen. Another well known strategy is distraction. So I read
computing books and test pre-release versions of lubuntu Linux. It
keeps my brain active and healthy.